Spanner Updates & Downloads. Don't have an account? Your Account. Garmin Express Maps and software to manage your devices. Improved support for Garmin Etrex, Foretrex. May want to set up your unit in serial / garmin mode in. Unit in Garmin Serial mode (if present) or Spanner.

3D Frog Frenzy Free Download. USB to Virtual Serial Ports for GPS’es Really enjoying this, and with nicer weather on its way it’s time to get back into GPS’ing and mapping with it. Good little unit, of course if you are looking for something for road navigating it can be used for that, sure; but it is more geared toward your outdoor activities. Yesterday I used the road navigation features, both out in the boonies as well as in the village of Gouverneur.

Worked quite nicely. Right now, I’m still just learning the in’s and out’s of the device, and learning a lot more about mapping and vector maps and converting everything to Garmin format. I did discover that there are a number of mapping programs that assume the GPS that is connected to the computer uses a serial port, instead of a more ‘modern’ USB.

Throw in Google Earth and other programs that SHOULD have GPS interfaces but don’t (Google Earth Plus does, but not regular free Google Earth) Fortunately there are ways around that for both. For example –.

This is a shareware program with a 14 day expiration date that creates virtual serial ports from USB connections. But there must be a freeware or Opensource driver or program that does the same somewhere – something that takes a USB port and makes some virtual serial ports for other programs to use? If anyone knows of one drop me a line so I can post the link, and try it out. I gave a free program from Garmin called a try, which is supposed to do the same thing. It’s made for particular models of Garmin GPS’es but the rumor was that it worked with many other Garmin GPS’es also. No luck with mine, stuck with GPSGate for now. GPSGate seemed to work fine on everything I tried it on – including an older version of MS Streets & Trips as well as the excellent radio mapping program.

A few good helper programs are the free and the free version of (there’s also a pay version with more options). Both are good as a sort of go-between between GPSGate and your serial-only GPS application, though the GPSGate seems to work for this fine by itself. These programs just make it easier. Of course, ideally the GPS mapping and waypoint programs themselves would be upgraded so that the regular USB driver would work, instead of relying on using serial ports; but that’s not always the case. So far the free (freeware), Topofusion (shareware), Quakemap (shareware), MS Streets & Maps 2002, (shareware),, & (highly recommended freeware) all work fine. I haven’t found one thing that doesn’t work. I’ve yet to try Netstumbler though, but I assume it will also (if it doesn’t already have a USB option).